"Ich bin ein Berliner"

Ja, Herr Prezident, ICH bin Berlinnerin. Wir sind ALLE Berliner!

So, ok, today after the guided tour of the Reichstag (equivalent of the U.S. Capitol building), I stepped into the Kennedy Museum at the Brandenburg Gate, influenced by the fact that it was close and they probably had a bathroom (yes!) and maybe a cafe (no).

It's the equivalent of about 3 rooms, mostly archival photos but also some artifacts of a lesser sort - a dress shirt, JFK's designer briefcase, handwritten notes, pens. There's quite a lot of material about JFK's 1963 trip to Berlin and how he sort of went off-script vis-a-vis the administration's policy of appeasement of the Soviets, because he was so incredibly appalled by seeing the Berlin Wall. (They took him on a 53-km drive of the wall in Berlin, which was the majority of his eight hours there.)

A side note: Some interesting notes from Jackie directing the addressees not to pay particular bills that she or Jack or others in the family had incurred. There was no context given for this, but my guess is that some stuff was "loaned" (jewelry, say) and other stuff was to be paid for by friends or the campaign rather than the Kennedy family personally.

I am not sure the Berlin Wall thing fits into my research outline but it's pretty interesting that there is all this stuff in Berlin. The museum was not well attended though. Taking photographs was not allowed (lots of copyright-protected iconic photos by famous photojournalists) unfortunately, so I ended up staying longer than I really wanted, to write down photo captions. Then in the bookstore I saw two books about JFK in Berlin, so probably this is well-covered territory. But, no one has yet analyzed the textual materials in this particular exhibit, I'd say. So there is room for some peripheral treatment, by me. Gotta write my field notes while all is fresh. More later.